CNN’s Anchor Alisyn Camerota And Contributor Margaret Hoover Describe Their Time At Fox News As “Hell”

The brothel-era at Fox Rape Channel is hopefully finally over. One day after Bill O’Reilly was ousted from Fox News, CNN’s Alisyn Camerota and Margaret Hoover appeared on air Thursday to discuss their time at Fox News and their experience with harassment at the network.

Camerota, who worked at Fox News for about 15 years before moving to CNN, where she now co-hosts that network’s morning show, New Day, said that she never experienced sexual harassment, but she certainly was bullied at the network.

“I had an experience, more than one, with Roger Ailes. But that wasn’t the half of it,” said Camerota. “The real harassment was emotional harassment there. Roger could be a bully, he would call people names. And it was that feeling of never wanting to run afoul of him that was really the chilling effect.”

O’Reilly was fired from the network Wednesday, weeks after a New York Times exposé revealed that the Fox News host and his employer paid $13 million to women who alleged he had sexually harassed or verbally abused them over the years. Ailes, formerly head of the network, was fired from Fox last summer. after a sexual harassment lawsuit from former anchor Gretchen Carlson.

Camerota also stressed that while Fox News has defended O’Reilly by saying that no employee called the network’s anonymous hotline, she wasn’t aware a hotline even existed.

“There was no hotline. I mean I can’t underscore this enough,” she said. “If a hotline is a secret, it doesn’t work.”

Hoover, now a consultant at CNN, agreed with Camerota’s characterization of Fox News, pointing to “a gossipy culture that was set up that also helped police what [Ailes] wanted to see. He really was a bully and enforced it in a culture that became so toxic that it was hard to feel that you had the ability to say what you wanted to say and to be authentic on the air there.”

She also said that while appearing on O’Reilly’s show, she felt like “a blond backdrop for O’Reilly’s opinions and not as a political analyst or a commentator,” which she called a “pretty common experience at Fox News.”

“I was never sexually harassed explicitly by Bill O’Reilly, but there moments that were very uncomfortable with him and I had to navigate a minefield, is what it felt like to me, to make sure that I never was in an experience or a situation where I felt vulnerable,” Hoover said.